'Patis' is fish sauce in Filipino. Baking and cooking up a storm in England.

Saturday, 29 November 2008

Caramel Cake

I've gone over to the dark side ... the dark side of caramel syrup I mean. I got so distracted with John Sargeant's dance of the pasa doble in Strictly Come Dancing's current season. The hilarity of seeing him dragging Kristina Rihanoff like a man taking out the rubbish was enough to make me forget the caramel syrup I was boiling. Let's just say it got quite dark with just a tinge of bitterness in it which I think is fabulous. So a thank you is in order to John and Kristina for making me burn the syrup. Hehehe!

Now getting back to baking, this month's Daring Baker's challenge is - Caramel Cake by Shauna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater and an optional Golden Vanilla Caramels from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich. It would have been a tragedy had I not made the latter since me and my family including all my work colleagues and all the classmates of my three kids ABSOLUTELY loved those chewy caramels. Never in my life have I encountered such moreish morsels of sweetness. Once you begin it's quite hard to stop. You have been warned!

As for the cake itself, it was lovely and really really appropriate for my birthday. Definitely a keeper though I'll just have to tone down the sweetness of the icing since it also has that caramel syrup glaze. As you can see from the last picture below, I got to practice my icing piping skills though the drizzling of the caramel was a bit of a disaster. Not to worry, afterall it's for my family's consumption so the caramel catastrophe lasted for quite a finite amount of time.